All Men Will Be Brothers
by HedgieX
Summary: Helen is struggling to cope with the memories that have come flooding back after the revelation that her mother is dead, but maybe she's failed to realise that Louise is suffering too.


All Men Will Be Brothers

_Based on Nicola Walker's breath-taking performance as Helen in the first episode of series three, and on Helen and Louise's relationship. Sorry for any continuity errors with Scott&Bailey – ITV player's adverts don't make it easy – and for the derivation from my normal rather cut-to-the-chase writing; I'm not quite sure how it turned out like this, but it did._

_For Manda_

Helen splayed her fingers over the piano keys. She thought about playing a tune, songs from her childhood, the classical music her sister had always twirled around their bedroom to. Beethoven and the like. Those evenings had been the only time she'd ever seen her look at peace, once the pair of them had barricaded the door with their chest of drawers and had the room to themselves. Helen had sat on her bed and studied (as a little girl, she'd always wanted to be a psychiatrist; that sounded ridiculous even in her own ears now), and Julie had danced.

Helen's father had taught her _Für Elise_. She'd played reasonably well, only stumbling on the occasional chord, but Julie's talent had overshadowed hers entirely. Not that she'd minded; Julie had not only been her sister, but her world. Shame, then, that she'd killed herself because she'd been unable to cope with what their parents had done to them. That sort of meant that Helen's world was non-existent, now Julie was gone, and that was certainly how it felt.

Beethoven's Ode to Joy: "All men will be brothers, under gentle wings." Helen remembered Julie teaching her a little bit of Latin whilst she danced, too, _Alle menschen werder brüder_. Oh, the dark irony. All men will be brothers, once our father rapes us no more. Her blood boiled at the memories of her parents' actions; there wasn't much left now, just a deep-seated fear of getting close to people, the odd twinge in her gut when she saw a parent holding their child to their chest. An eternal hatred of those two people she hadn't seen since she was fifteen, the two people she'd trusted above all others.

And how had they repaid her? With jeering and callousness, and slaps, the type that brought tears to the eyes instantly and left shadows of fingers on the face. She'd almost begun to get past what they'd done to her, but time could never heal what they'd done to Julie.

Helen splayed her fingers again, but instead of playing she clenched her fists and hammered them down on the ivory keys, over and over. The melancholy notes echoed around the living room, as disjointed as she felt. _What is there left for me?_

Those coppers, the glee dancing across their lips and pooling in their eyes when she didn't react to her mother's death, thinking this was going to be an easy conviction. _You don't seem very surprised._ They had no idea, they really didn't. The announcement of the death was sweet in her ears, she'd wanted to get up and dance as Julie had when they were children.

She hadn't done it. Spending the rest of her life in prison might actually be an improvement on freedom; she'd embrace the routine of it, the spaghetti bolognaise on a Monday and all-day breakfast on a Tuesday, the hour of exercise per day, the solitude of the cell. She could cry into the mattress and nobody would give a damn. They could lock her up, if they wanted. It didn't matter what they thought, what anyone thought, because she had not done it. And she was broken anyway, wasn't she? Her parents had dealt with that.

She hammered her fists down again. What was it with the dots above the letter U, anyway? Für, brüder: nausea rose in her throat whenever she saw the _Müller_ yoghurts in Tesco. It wasn't always the obvious things, like a mother scooping up her little girl and smothering her scraped knee in kisses, that wormed their way into Helen's heart. Silly, but those yoghurts reminded her of the abuse just as much as reading in a newspaper that a woman had been raped in a park. Suffering couldn't be categorised, no matter how many times DC Bailey suggested otherwise. So yes, they could arrest her, they could find her guilty, they could throw away the key, but she had not done it. She only wished she had, for Julie.

"Not very tuneful."

Helen hadn't realised Louise had come downstairs. She felt anger towards her partner suddenly, totally unjustified anger bubbling underneath the surface. This wasn't Louise's fault, nothing ever was; she was the only person (except for Julie, and even she'd betrayed her now) Helen had been able to learn to open up to. Louise knew everything, she knew about the flowers Helen's father had always presented her with after their 'special time', she knew about the dreams of studying psychology and about the Müller yoghurts.

She'd come home whilst Helen was kneeling beside the body of her dead sister, and she'd held her all night long and into the morning after they'd taken Julie away.

Louise moved across to stand behind Helen and leant down over her shoulder. Her hair tickled Helen's neck. She loved her partner's hair, unconventional as it might have been; it sort of defined her overall attitude to life. She was an individual, she wasn't afraid to be who she wanted to be despite people trying to destroy her happiness. Helen envied her strength. She'd always envied Julie's strength, too.

Helen stood up, knocking into Louise. She didn't want intimacy tonight, she couldn't cope with intimacy. "I need a drink."

"Hel–"

"Just one."

It'd be several, it always was. Helen knew she would regret it in the morning. She would wake disorientated with a throbbing head, and spend tomorrow miserable and bitter, shouting at Louise for trying to comfort her, refusing to eat, that kind of thing. And somehow she'd justify it, like she had done to DC Bailey; it was her parents. _It's the reason I drink._

"Why don't we just go t'bed?"

"Do you want one or not?" Helen snapped, bending down and snatching a bottle of beer from the fridge. She turned to see Louise's response and hit her head on the corner of the sideboard.

She cursed, not just for the pain but for the sheer hopelessness of it all, for the way she battled with herself every single day. _I could see Julie again. _Even Louise didn't know about that, about the urge to end everything. It had burned Helen's insides, finding Julie like that, with the bottle of pills smashed on the floor beside her, the droplets of dribble on her chin. She really didn't want to put Louise through the pain, but even so she was sometimes tempted to jump in front of her bus before work like a child would be tempted by a chocolate sitting on the floor in front of them. _My life is hanging by a thread._

"Helen."

The softness of Louise's voice surprised her. She shoved past her and locked herself in the bathroom. She wrapped her fingers around the metal top to the beer bottle and twisted; the ridges dug in and she enjoyed the pain. The edge of the bath was hard beneath her, and she thought about running a bath and submerging herself. _By the time Louise broke the door down, I'd be gone._

"Open the door."

"Just leave me alone." Her own voice was choked with tears she hadn't realised were falling. She sniffed, furious at herself for being so feeble. If she'd stood up to her father when Julie was being abused, as Julie had done for Helen, maybe Julie wouldn't have borne the brunt of the attacks. _She was all I had, and I let her go._

"I've got the bottle opener 'ere."

"I don't want it."

Louise gave a half-laugh. Helen could see the shadow of her partner's feet through the crack beneath the door. "No. 'Course you don't."

"You don't understand."

Louise was silent. _Low blow._ Helen stood up and smashed the bottle over the side of the sink angrily. The plughole gurgled as it swallowed the beer up. The bathroom was blue with a darker blue border at chest height; the border was decorated with yellow seahorses. Louise sometimes said Helen's eyes were as bright as the border on the wall, but the colour looked horrible to Helen today. She felt like a little girl who'd been left on the beach watching the rest of her family splashing around in the warm water.

No chance of that, of course. The only visit to the beach that Helen could remember had ended in her father submerging Julie under the water. An old couple had come across to check if everything was okay, and her father had pulled Julie up by her hair and acted the hero, "Oh, she just went a bit far out, that's all." The old couple hadn't looked convinced. Helen had hated them at the time for not doing something to help, but what could they have done? You didn't interfere with other people's kids, did you?

Leaving at fifteen, and never going back. She wondered about asking DC Bailey if the police would check the attic to see if all of her things were still there, the dolls and the books. The old recordings of Beethoven.

"I don't know what I can do, Helen."

_You can't do anything._

After Julie's death, Helen had begun to feel broody. She didn't understand the feeling, children had always frightened her before, but suddenly she wanted a child. She wanted to be deprived of sleep by something other than nightmares; she wanted to be able to slip little pink or blue sandals onto tiny ivory feet, and push a buggy beneath trees in the park.

She'd never known Sheila and Michael. She wanted a little victory against the world, to somehow repay all three of her siblings all those years of abuse they'd gone through. It would cement her relationship with Louise (although Louise didn't know about her pangs for a child); it would give her something real to want to live for.

"I try so hard." When Helen got angry or upset, her childhood accent returned to her, but Louise's voice lost some of her dialect when she was emotional, Helen realised. "I do everything I can to be there for you. And sometimes it just seems like– I don't know, like you're lost. Like you're fighting everyone and you just d'know how to stop fighting."

_Stillness dancer_, that was a phrase from a poem she'd read a while back, something she'd always associated with Julie. _Alle menschen werder brüder._ The way she'd swung her limbs around the confined space between their beds so gracefully, whilst Helen flushed pink as she attempted to copy and ended up stumbling.

She looked at herself in the mirror. Her head was bleeding where she'd hit it on the sideboard, already blossoming into a bruise. There was blood on her hands too, she couldn't tell whether it was from her head or where the broken glass had cut her. She was wearing a pink jumper over leggings, and the jumper smothered the shape of her curves, concealed her from the world. She'd been wearing a similar jumper when she'd found Julie, and she'd stripped it off and made a pillow for her sister's head, and when the body had been taken away she'd hugged the jumper to her face until the sequins made little imprints, like she'd been hit with a colander. Then she'd splashed alcohol all over the jumper and set fire to it in the back garden at midnight.

The door quivered slightly as Louise sat down on the other side and leant against it. Helen knew that Louise knew about the trips she made to see Rhiannon, she knew that Louise was right about Helen fighting all of the time. They never talked about what she did when she went out (there were many things that Helen wouldn't talk about), and Helen felt a burning shame when she considered how it must make Louise feel. She thought about describing Rhiannon to DC Bailey, her hair colour and her tattoo. _She knows me_, like she had to justify it to herself. When she was with Louise, it meant something, and Helen didn't want that; she wanted it to be mindless, for it not to matter, for her not to have to give away a part of herself when it happened.

"My little sister had Asperger's, only I'm not sure they knew it was Asperger's, then, just that she was a bit different," Louise said quietly, "She would go to the bathroom when she was upset. She didn't like anyone to touch her, she would shout all kinds of things at my mother when she tried to comfort her. I would sit outside the door for hours."

Helen was knocked off guard entirely by the fact that Louise had a sister. She'd said when they first met that she had no family to speak of, and had always maintained that. All this time, Helen had laid her burdens on Louise's shoulders, piled them up, and Louise had suffered silently with her own problems underneath Helen's. _Shit._

"I would read stories to her. I got books out from the library and read her some of them, but she got bored. She always asked for the same story, _Egbert Nosh_, it was about this man who went for a walk and his house and bins followed him." Louise's voice was trembling. "I didn't like it, it was American so all the words were silly, 'trash can' and 'sidewalk', but she loved it. It was the only way you could get her to smile sometimes."

"What happened?"

"They agreed only to follow him on Sundays."

"No, I mean– what happened to your sister?"

"I came out when I was seventeen, and my father refused to pay for me to go to university. My mum was weak, she couldn't stand up to him. My sister was ten years younger than me, there was no way I could see her without my parents being involved, so I cut ties with all of them, and my dad drove them all into a river the year after."

_Shit._ "You didn't–"

Louise said nothing. Helen dropped the neck of the bottle into the sink and some more shards broke off it and fell like confetti. _She never talked about any of this. She never drank herself into oblivion or slept with a prostitute._ Like Julie, she'd always been so strong; it occurred to Helen now that she'd never seen Louise cry, in all this time.

The pain bubbling beneath the surface, the pressure building up until one day the surface cracked and the fingers forced white tablet after white tablet down the throat and oblivion came. Helen had been thinking about what her suicide would do to Louise; had Louise been thinking the same? _Stillness dancers._ Both reunited with their sisters.

"Did you go to their funerals?"

Helen imagined Louise's shrug. "I didn't find out until about a year after. My parents were buried together, I took flowers to their grave."

"What about your sister?"

"Please, open the door."

It was easier to have this conversation when she couldn't see the pain on Louise's face. _Alle menschen werder brüder._ Damaged people were brought together because they could hold each other up, but Helen's support of Louise had been non-existent. She wasn't sure if anger (all these years she'd asked Helen to let her in, and all the while she'd been withholding everything) or guilt was the overwhelming feeling.

"Let me look at your head. We can– we'll have a drink, if you want."

_I don't want a bloody drink any more._

"My sister is called Ruby. She was on life support for a couple of years after the accident, the doctors wanted to give up on her. She's in a care home now; she can't talk, she can't feed herself. I go to see her every Sunday after I do the shopping. We all have our secrets." Definitely crying now. "She can squeeze my fingers, and she can smile. I still read _Egbert Nosh _to her. She knows all about you, all about the colour of your eyes and how– how kind you are, and how smart you look when you're dressed for work. I told her that I'd– one day, I'd take you to meet her."

Helen had seen this evening going only one way. She'd seen Louise giving up and going to bed alone, leaving her to drink until she didn't know the ceiling from the floor, until she crawled up the stairs and collapsed onto the bottom of the bed and sobbed into Louise's feet.

Those years when Julie had lived here, having Helen's sister so close by when Louise couldn't ever live in the same house as hers again. Helen talking of disowning her parents, and never thinking about it being the other way round, about how it must have been for Louise to be disowned.

Now she opened the bathroom door and took Louise in her arms and kissed her hair.

She didn't want to go to prison, she didn't want to die. She wanted to stay here with Louise and talk about Ruby and take away the pain. She wanted to prove her innocence to DC Bailey, and prove her worth to her parents, and she wanted to rebuild her life with Louise firmly inside the walls. She wanted to adopt a little girl with green eyes, like Julie's had been.

"Would you? Would you come– come with me–"

"Of course I will," she said.

She took Louise's hands and helped her up. The bottle opener fell from Louise's lap to the floor and lay there against the skirting board. The blood from Helen's hands was streaked in Louise's hair; it looked oddly pretty, as though she'd had highlights added. Louise lifted one of her hands and pressed it to the cut on Helen's forehead.

"Louise," she said, savouring it, and then "I'm sorry."

Never going to be enough, but it was the beginning. She'd go to a charity shop and find some Beethoven, and she'd teach herself to play it on the piano, properly, and afterwards she'd take Louise's hands and dance with her. And none of this was going to happen tomorrow, it would take time, Helen knew that, like proving her innocence would take time, and getting the blood out of her jumper and feeling comfortable around Ruby and adopting a child would take time. But they would all be worth it. _Our suffering is what defines us._ There was the whole world left for her, left for them.

_Alle menschen werder brüder_. All men will be brothers, under gentle wings.


End file.
